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2024-11-11

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Question: how do we know where (what direction, orientation, velocity) neutrinos come from? (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I've seen a few articles about neutrinos recently, high energy ones, super fast ones, ones from open space, others from "sources", and my understanding of the particle is that it's very hard to detect, passes through light-years of lead without interaction, etc. don't headings and speed require multiple readings to make? How do we know the velocity of a neutrino when we can only detect them at single points?

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (2 children)

I don’t know for sure but I assume it’s similar to ballistic analysis; you can get a good idea of the origin point based on all the detected interactions the ‘projectile’ had with surrounding matter.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

I was just reading the Ars article about the new seafloor detector and comments on that. From that, it sounds like there's a cascade of the neutrino decaying into other particles and emitting light/radiation as it goes, so I would assume that gives you a vector and I wonder if different stages emit different wavelengths. Glad to be corrected though!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 month ago

Trouble with that is that the chance of a neutrino having more than one interaction in a detector are almost 0. And there could be detections from all kinds of directions.